Staying A Step Ahead Of Hackers With Continuous Verification


We’re all familiar with the apps on our phones and how often they get updated. Most of the time, these updates are done over the air quickly and easily. Other times, a completely new download of the software is required. But let’s take a look at the hardware platforms that the software runs on. What happens when the hardware needs to be upgraded? Today’s hardware platforms are expensive t... » read more

SiC And Industrial Servos: A Perfect Match


The automation engineers of the 1960s would look with envy at the servo technology in use today. Small, precise, and, above all, electric, they are a reflection of the compactness of the semiconductor control, sensor, and power technology we have available today. Today’s biggest challenge remains the cabling between the servo and its controller. Notoriously expensive, due to having to withsta... » read more

Precision: A Case Study For Success


Recently, I was watching a documentary on the NASA Perseverance mission to Mars. I’ve always been fascinated by space travel and the engineering efforts to make it happen. We’ve all heard that the landing for this trip to Mars was the most precise in history, but what the documentary brought to light is the precision involved in each and every aspect of the Perseverance Rover design and dev... » read more

Where Imperfections Lead To Opportunity


By Evelyn Hu It is natural to hold a bias that assumes that the highest-quality devices are those formed from the most perfect materials (crystalline, well-ordered, stoichiometric). Therefore, it is ironic, and perhaps counterintuitive, that particular kinds of defects, such as vacancies (missing atoms) in semiconductor materials, can form the building blocks of a new quantum information tec... » read more

The Rise Of SmartNICs


Network interface cards (NICs) have been on the market since shortly after the first PCs in the mid-1980s. However, over the past few years, we’ve seen the emergence of SmartNICs. What is a SmartNIC? The most basic definition of a SmartNIC is simply a programmable NIC. Others have overloaded the concept by heaping vast amounts of silicon and firmware into their implementations. A good work... » read more

Integrating Embedded FPGA Made Easy


Chip designers have been integrating hard and soft IPs for decades – some being easy to integrate and others much more difficult. But what about eFPGA? It’s a relatively new IP on the IP landscape and according to data from Gartner, the market share of semiconductors with eFPGA is expected to approach $10B in 2023 with greater than 50% compounded annual growth. So, this raises the question ... » read more

The Road To Domain-Specific Accelerators


For about fifty years, IC designers have been relying on different types of semiconductor scaling to achieve gains in performance. Best known is Moore’s Law, which predicted that the number of transistors in a given silicon area and clock frequency would double every two years. This was combined with Dennard scaling, which predicted that with silicon geometries and supply voltages shrinki... » read more

Invent A New Way To Do Your Job


My friends own a farm in the southwest of France, and though I spent most of my recent decades around big cities, my village-raised roots are sending me working in the fields every time I have the time. I don’t really care what I’m assigned to, as long as soil, the nearby forest trees, and the sky (preferably blue) will take part. If the job consists of repeating actions, I like to come up ... » read more

Flat-Panel Display Demand Soars


What a difference a year makes in the flat-panel display market. Prior to the Covid-19 pandemic outbreak in early 2020, the flat-panel display (FPD) market was gloomy. Oversupply, falling prices and losses were the common themes in the market. It’s been a different story during the outbreak. In 2020, the FPD market rebounded. In the stay-at-home economy, consumers went on a buying spree... » read more

Potential For 5G In Daily Life


The excitement around the rollout of 5G technology could not be more palpable. We see this next-generation technology in news headlines and commercials, with promises to usher in the next wave of internet capabilities, speeds, and frictionless internet access. Let’s look at what 5G is and how semiconductor advancements are driving this new technology. What is 5G? 5G technology can be su... » read more

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